Monday came so fast that I would swear there was never a Sunday that week. Now I know how everyone else feels about work. I threw on my one suit, and waited for my dad to drive me to the old E-Zee Express Bus so I could catch the train to the city. At 6:30 a.m. things start looking very bleak. Just an hour earlier, I had contemplated suicide as I washed my face and got ready to shave. Holding a sharp, cold blade in your hand at 5:30 a.m. leads you to make one, tough decision: Do I slit my throat or shave off my stubble? I assure you that it is a tough choice, but today it seemed even more daunting. By 5:31, I had made up my mind to shave off the stubble and face the day. Here I come, fellow lawyers. Next stop, two hours later, the city.
I arrived at The Law Offices of Michael H. Goldberg at about 7:55 a.m. I didn’t get but one foot in the door when I felt all five feet of Mr. Goldberg breathing fire down my neck. Well, actually it was more like my lower back.
“You’re late!” he barked.
Late? It couldn’t be later than 7:55 a.m. Could this guy be for real?
“I like my attorneys to be prompt and that means not one minute late. You, dear boy, are five minutes late. According to my watch it is now 8:06, which makes you five minutes late, and even worse you have wasted one minute of my time.”
This certainly was an interesting development. This man obviously had set his watch ten minutes ahead so he could be early to work, on time for meetings or just to bust the balls of his employees when they got to the office late. Apparently, he had taken it upon himself to hold the rest of the world to his time-keeping standards. As I was being berated, I looked over and saw another guy around my age sitting at a desk with a look in his eyes that would have made him easy prey for any hunter. His eyes looked dead, and not the kind of dead eyes that you have after dropping too much acid. He had big, brown, lifeless eyes that fixated on me with the innocent look of a deer right before the kill shot.
“Well, now that you’re here, let’s get started. Come with me,” he made a sweeping motion with his hand and we shuffled to another part of the “office.”
“Marc, what the hell are you waiting for? Get up and get over here,” he screamed at the guy sitting at the table entering data. I wasn’t sure if Marc was a lawyer, paralegal, man servant or gimp. I was sure that he liked abuse. “Did you think you were going to sit there all day? Jackass.”
Mr. Goldberg continued six steps over to the one other area in this office. This was the other room that, he explained, would be our workspace. Apparently, Marc and I were now sharing a workspace. This space consisted of a collage of file cabinets at different heights, papers stacked and strewn all over like a hoarder's room that hasn’t been touched in 10 years, and a desk that appeared to have heaved itself out of the dirt-covered floor.
“This is your desk,” he pointed to the dilapidated, fold-up, make-shift desk. “I need you to go through these folders and enter into this here computer the hospital where the client was taken.” He threw a stack of folders on the desk. “I’ll be back around lunch time. We’ll see how you did then,” and with that Mr. Goldberg walked right out of the office.
“Let’s go, jackass,” he barked, and Marc followed him like a dog.
For the next couple of hours, I went through file after file searching for the line on the complaint that specified the hospital. During this mind-numbing exercise, my thoughts drifted to the fact that I lived at home with my parents at twenty-five years old. Jesus Christ. After the first hour, my thoughts turned to the horrible realization that I was being paid ten dollars an hour to do data entry. Ten dollars an hour to sit like an eek, eek, monkey and enter the names of hospitals into a computer program. But here I was eek, eeking along.
Mr. Goldberg returned about noon, “Let’s see what we have here.” He paged through the folders, cross-checked a few, and proceeded to slowly work himself into a frenzy that would culminate in a human fireworks display.
“Wha – What do we have here?” He pointed at the fifteen-inch monitor. “This says Jamaca Hospital. Right here, right here on the screen. I don’t see an “I” anywhere in that word. There is no “I”. Am I crazy? You do see it, right?” He pointed again at the screen, this time pressing so hard that an actual noise was coming from it.
I saw Marc cower. If he could have dug a foxhole he would have, and then jumped right in. I also sensed that he would not have let me share it with him. Very selfish, Marc. He knew what was coming and wanted to be protected from the shelling that was about to start.
“You see this word is missing an “I”. An “I,” of all letters,” his voice was rising now. “I cannot believe this. This word is missing an “I”,” he was now screaming. “YOU SPELL JAMAICA WITH AN “I”. J-A-M-A-“I”-C-A. A-I-C-A!” His voice reached a pitch I had not heard to that point in my life, nor have I heard since, “NOT A-C-A. WHAT KIND OF JACKASS ARE YOU?”
He had gotten so excited that he kept repeating himself, screaming, “A-I-C-A” over and over. He was now enunciating every letter at the top of his lungs. “A-I-C-A! A-I-C-A!” This lunatic rambled on for another five minutes, although it seemed to last at least fifteen. As Michael H. Goldberg, Esq., continued to spew his staccato insanity, I got up and walked out of the office, thus closing the first chapter in my new law career.